Gix the Demon Hunts Xantcha
Chapter 21 is where everything the book has been building toward starts to crack open. Xantcha has to deal with what happened with Gix in the catacombs, and the truth she discovers at Koilos changes everything.
Xantcha’s Confession
Eight days after her encounter with Gix, Xantcha is sitting in a tree, waiting for Urza, talking to herself. She’s terrified. Not of Gix finding her again. She’s terrified because she hasn’t told anyone what happened.
Urza shows up cheerful. He’s got plans. He wants to do all the spider-planting himself for the next nine days and send Xantcha and Ratepe away for a vacation. He never stops talking long enough for Xantcha to get a word in about demons.
So she takes the coward’s way out. She accepts the nine days.
Back at the cottage, Ratepe is angry because he thinks she told Urza about their side plans. They fight. Xantcha runs out. It’s messy. They eventually talk the next morning, and here’s where things get real.
Ratepe says to her: “The day you bought me, I told you that you were a lousy liar. You may be three thousand years old, Xantcha, but my eight-year-old brother could fib better than you.”
That line works because it’s true. Xantcha is terrible at hiding things. She can survive Phyrexia and face down demons, but she cannot keep a straight face when she’s scared.
She tells Ratepe about Gix. About the catacomb. About how the demon nearly pulled her into Phyrexia. And about how thinking of Ratepe’s face was what saved her.
Ratepe’s response is perfect. He doesn’t panic (much). He works through it logically. Gix said he “made” the brothers and he “made” Xantcha. But the Weakstone would have recognized Mishra in Xantcha if any part of Mishra was in her. It didn’t. And if Gix had touched Ratepe, the Weakstone would have killed him. So it’s lies. Probably.
The Weakstone having opinions is such a wild concept. It doesn’t like Phyrexians. It especially doesn’t like Gix. It might be responsible for Urza’s distrust of Xantcha. These stones aren’t just power sources. They have preferences.
The Trip to Koilos
Ratepe mentions that Koilos still exists. Xantcha always assumed it was destroyed with Argoth. It wasn’t. It’s still sitting in the Kher Ridge on old Terisiare, and Ratepe knows roughly where it is from his father’s books and Mishra’s memories via the Weakstone.
So they go. They fly the sphere across the Sea of Laments, which is miserable. Two days of huddling under blankets in a roaring wind. They find a goatherd who points them toward Koilos. They follow ancient marker stones through mountain passes until they find it. A saddle-back mountain overshadowing three smaller peaks, with a hollowed plateau behind a cleft in the rock.
Seven thousand years, and the battle scars remain. Giant pockmarks in the cliffs. Cottage-sized rubble. Shadows left by fire, not sun.
Ratepe is awestruck. Xantcha is disappointed. The place is dead. Just another cave with some old tools. No Phyrexian scent. Nothing useful.
Until the sunset light hits the walls.
The Revelation
The cavern walls are covered in carvings. And Xantcha can read them. They’re the same writing carved into the walls of the Fane of Flesh in Phyrexia. The same glyphs she learned as a newt.
The inscriptions say things like “the glory and destiny is compleation.” They list names and battles. Gix is named as a strong-something of the Thran. Of the Thran.
Her own name is there too. “Xantcha” is a number carved into the floor of the Fane to mark where newts stood.
This is the bomb that goes off in this chapter. The Phyrexians didn’t invade Dominaria. There was no outside invasion. The Thran split into factions and one faction became the Phyrexians. Gix was Thran. The Ineffable was probably Thran. The powerstones are Thran technology. The whole history Urza built his life around is wrong.
Xantcha breaks down. “All our lives, we’ve been chasing shadows!”
Ratepe holds her and says something that might be the wisest thing in this entire book: “It’s laugh or cry, Xantcha. If you’ve truly wasted three thousand years and you’re stuck fighting a war that was stupid four thousand years before that, then either you laugh and keep going, or you cry and give it up.”
They can’t tell Urza. If he knew the Thran weren’t noble heroes, if he knew they were the same as the Phyrexians, it would destroy him. Or worse, it wouldn’t change a thing. Because Urza is immune to truth.
This chapter is a masterpiece. The slow burn of the confession, the brutal adventure to Koilos, and then the revelation that rewrites the entire mythology of the story. Abbey takes the foundational assumption of the Artifact Cycle and flips it. There are no good guys in ancient history. Just factions. And the war Urza has been fighting for millennia was always a civil war.